The Last Innocent Hour

by Margot Abbott

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have anything else to drink?” Annaliese stood up, looking around the room. “Oh, what is this?” she said, spying the bottle of brandy on the floor under the little sink. “Good. I’ll pour us both a drink.” She looked around for glasses.

  “I only have the one glass,” Sally said, getting up quickly. “Here, I can wash out my coffee mug.”

  “I’ll do it.” Annaliese reached for the mug. She rinsed it, then poured the brandy, handing the mug back to Sally. “I’m sorry to be so hard,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “I’ve gotten very nasty.” Sally took a sip of brandy. It wasn’t very good, but she welcomed the sharpness. “Why are you here?”

  “You were looking for us. I wanted to know why.”

  “Your mother was kind to me. I’ll never forget that, and because . . . because I wanted to see if I could do anything.”

  “Because of my brother.”

  “Yes. And no. Because of your mother, too. Maybe more.” Annaliese walked to the window and pushed it open.

  “Mama’s dead,” she said, not turning around. “An air raid. She was buried in a shelter, left there. My sister Marta died in London, also in a raid, but one of ours. That was all in ’42, a long time ago. But Ursula is still alive in Copenhagen. I have many Danish nieces and nephews.” She reached for a cigarette. “What about your family? I mostly remember your brother. What was his name?” '

  “Eddie,” Sally said dumbly. At the news of Lisa’s death, she had stood up, the mug of brandy still in her hand. She looked down at it. Lisa dead too.

  “Yes, Eddie, that’s it. I remember him at the lake those summers. Didn’t he go into the navy?”

  “Yes.” Sally drained the mug.

  “He died,” said Annaliese flatly. Sally looked up at her. “I can recognize your expression. I’ve seen it so often. You get used to it.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not really. Not ever.” Sally sank down on the bed. Lisa dead. She hadn’t realized how much she had counted on Lisa Mayr’s being alive and safe somewhere. “I’d hoped that your mother had gone back to Denmark to stay.”

  “She came back. She was a Berliner.” They were silent for a moment, then Annaliese said in a gentle voice, “I’m sorry about your brother. I never thought of Americans dying.”

  “We died.”

  “Yes. You’ve grown hard too,” said Annaliese.

  “Yes.”

  “You were a sweet girl, Sally.” She smiled a true smile that thawed the ice in her eyes. “You always were. Nice. Honest. So was your brother.”

  “So was yours,” said Sally, although her voice caught on the words.

  Annaliese smiled a funny half-smile. “Was he? He might have been once. Yes, I think he was, back then. But he wound up a real bastard.”

  Sally looked at the ugly utility light on the nightstand. “Annaliese,” she started, but had to stop and swallow, her voice felt so raspy. “Annaliese, is he still alive?”

  Annaliese shrugged. “I don’t know. The last time I saw him was before the Russians came. I begged him to get Klara and me out of the city. He could have, too. He was on his way south on some official matter—he said—and he could have taken us. He didn’t even come to the apartment where I lived. I had to run into him on the Muhldamm. I asked him right there, but he left us to the Russians. I didn’t care so much for me, you understand. My generation is finished. But I’ll never forgive him for Klara’s sake. She is all the hope I had left; she is all that is left that is good. And my brother left her to die. I hate him for it. So, no—I don’t know if he lived and I hope he didn’t. He probably changed out of his pretty uniform and ran away somewhere. All those supermen, so called, did that. Big, strong men. They ran out on their women and children, leaving us to . . .”

  Picking up her glass, Annaliese drank the last of the brandy. “You must meet my Klara. I want you to, because I want you to help her. That’s the real reason I came to see you.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” said Sally. “I’ll do anything I can for her. Just tell me.”

  Annaliese laughed sadly. “I just thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “You were almost her aunt.”

  Sally slid to the foot of the bed and leaned forward, looking up at Annaliese. “I thought that too. Let me be, please? For your mother’s sake. I’d be happy to do whatever I can for Klara. For you, too.”

  "What do you want? Why be so altruistic?”

  “I loved your mother, Annaliese. Your family was the best part of my childhood. I’ve lost them all, too. As well as my own. There’s nobody left, Annaliese. And Christian, I loved him. I can’t say I didn’t, that it was all wrong. There’s no one left now.”

  “You and me.”

  “And your daughter.”

  Annaliese reached to touch Sally’s face. “I see,” she said gently, a bright gleam in her eyes. Annaliese looked at Sally for a long while, her expression inscrutable, then, suddenly, she glanced out the window. It was dark. “I had better go. Here, I’ll give you my address and a phone number. The Russian officer, a colonel, downstairs from me has a telephone and allows me a message on emergencies. Perhaps next Saturday you will come to meet my Klara.”

  “I will be happy to,” Sally said, handing her the small notepad from her table. Annaliese wrote quickly and handed the pad back to Sally. “There, now you know where we are.”

  “Yes,” said Sally. “And what can I bring? Powered milk? Clothes?”

  Annaliese thought for a moment. “A coat,” she said. “We eat sufficiently, but I have no coat for her.”

  “Good,” Sally said. “I’ll do what I can. Now, do you have a way home?”

  “Yes,” Annaliese said, opening her bag and checking her lipstick. “I have a ride.”

  Sally walked Annaliese downstairs. After they said good-bye, she stood in the door of the building and watched Annaliese walk across the street and get into a black sedan. Sally couldn’t really see the driver, but he wore a military cap and she wondered about the Russian colonel Annaliese said lived downstairs from her. She knew there were German women living on the largess of the occupying armies, and she knew that if she were in the same position, with a four-year-old daughter, she might do the same thing. Her own life and the choices she had to make suddenly seemed so simple compared with those Annaliese faced.

  UPSTAIRS AGAIN, SALLY crossed the room in the dark, and leaning on the window sill, she studied the shell of the building across the street. It was a bright night, and the shadows cast on the ruin by the moon were sharply lined and black.

  Somehow, she felt less alone. She suspected that Annaliese had information about Christian, for which she would just have to wait patiently. Meanwhile, she knew Annaliese would exploit their connection for her daughter. But, she, Sally, would use it too. Perhaps she could help Christian’s niece. After hearing how he abandoned her, Sally realized just how much he must have changed. The man she had loved would never have left his sister and niece in the path of an invading army.

  What had happened to him? And the same old questions followed that one: Where had he been when she was lying nearly dead in that Berlin hospital? Why hadn’t he ever contacted her?

  Sally thought of Annaliese’s description of him the morning after, sitting on the steps of the apartment crying. She could see him, had seen him, crying in his uniform, had seen the incongruity of the military trappings and his tears.

  Sally turned abruptly from the window. “I’m so . . . so sick of this,” she said angrily to the dark room. She balled her hands into fists and pushed them against her forehead, the heels of her hands against her eyes, making sparks and dark colors appear, until her head hurt.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Sally lay awake in the moonlit room, listening to the silence stretching out around her. Christian was in her thoughts, as he had been since she first flew over the ruins of the city.

  As she turned on her side, her eyes fell on her bag sitting on the foot of the othe
r bed. The photographs were still there, at the bottom, where she had put them three months ago.

  She sat up and scrambled across her bed to grab the bag. In the dark, she opened it and pulled out the photographs. She didn’t look at the pictures in her hand for a long time. She thought of nothing. Just sat in the dark holding the pictures, until, finally, she turned on the little lamp above her nightstand.

  The photograph on top was a group shot, taken on the flagstone terrace of the green house on the lake. There were several adults and many children of various ages in the picture. She turned it over: “Lake Sebastian, 1923.”

  In front, sitting cross-legged on the ground was Sally, aged ten. She was a sturdy-looking little girl, with long, messy braids and no shoes. She wore a dress with a flowered pattern, and she looked at the camera with her head slightly ducked, her expression grave.

  Her family was behind her: her beautiful mother, seated gracefully on a wicker chair, her full skirt fanned out; her father, standing straight and tall, in a light summer suit, his arms crossed; Eddie, tanned and stocky, sitting on a step above Sally. His grin was enormous.

  Sally smiled at him. How familiar they all looked, how dear, and yet, so distant. She barely remembered her father as young as he was here; she couldn’t remember her mother’s voice, nor her brother’s.

  The Mayr family took up the major portion of the photograph. There were eight of them: Herr Doktor Mayr and Lisa, the parents; Marta, Ursula, Annaliese, and Elizabeth, the daughters; and Kurt and Christian, the sons. There had been another son as well: Thomas, who had died at Passchendaele in the First World War.

  With a start, thinking of Thomas, the hero, Sally realized that nearly all of the people in the photograph were dead. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, enumerating the list. Elizabeth of illness later that same year. Herr Doktor and Kurt . . . the first by his own hand in 1933, the second in a street fight in 1927. Lisa and Marta in air raids. Eddie bayoneted by a Japanese soldier. Her father of a heart attack before Pearl Harbor, and her mother four years after the picture was taken, in the accident in New York. Just me and Ursula and Annaliese. And him.

  Sally lowered her head to look down at the fair young man with the grave expression, his elbow on his bare knee, his chin in his hand. Christian.

  What of Christian? Was he still alive?

  She slid the family photograph behind the other she held in her hand. It was one of those pictures taken in nightclubs by young women in short skirts, and indeed, in the lower-right-hand corner was the name of a club, in German, embossed in gold art-deco lettering: The Blue Parrot.

  A crowded tabletop took up the bottom part of the photo. Glasses, full ashtrays, and empty plates surrounded a small lamp with parrots painted on the shade. Seated at the table was a younger, plumper, prettier Sally, dressed in a sparkling, low-cut evening gown, which showed off her round arms and shoulders and cleavage. Her dark hair was dressed close to her head, but some curls had escaped and framed her face above her ears.

  She was leaning close to Christian. They had pushed their chairs together for the picture, Christian with his arm along the back of Sally’s chair, his fingers lighting against her bare shoulder. They were happy and drunk, their cheeks shiny, their smiles wide. The Sally in the picture gazed up at Christian adoringly, her large eyes, heavily made up, bright. Her head was tilted back in order to look into his face, and there was a voluptuous abandonment in the posture. Her bare arm lay on the table and a wedding ring was clearly visible on her finger.

  Christian gazed out of the photograph, his expression guarded but friendly. His fair hair was parted on the right and combed straight back from his high, square forehead. He had straight eyebrows and a long, straight nose; his mouth was wide and thin-lipped, especially when he was not smiling. His features were stern and regular and his handsomeness could be forbidding. But when he smiled, as he was doing in the photograph, his face lit up, all the straight lines curving, the hard planes softening. He was, at any rate, smiling or not, a very handsome young man.

  He was also an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer, a captain, and was wearing, in the photograph, the flashy silver-and-black dress uniform that was, even then, a symbol of cruelty and hatred.

  Sally studied him, as though she could tell from his face, photographed over eleven years ago, if he lived. But she knew, whether he lived or not, that the memory of him would continue to weigh on her.

  She shouldn’t have come to Berlin. Not without knowing whether he was dead or not. In 1935, he was already a captain, a protégé of Heydrich, and, according to Annaliese, he had still been alive in 1945, and involved with important errands. He had, it seemed, prospered in the SS, even after the death of his mentor, Reinhard Heydrich. No doubt he had remained in the SD, the state security service, and no matter where he was, he was sure to have been implicated in some aspect of the evil the SS had perpetrated all over Europe.

  He had left his sister and niece in Berlin in the path of the revengeful Russians. Perhaps he had been killed or captured during the invasion. Holding one photograph in each hand, Sally searched Christian’s two faces, the boy’s and the young man’s, and she hoped, fervency hoped, he had died.

  You are beautiful and I will love you forever, she had said to him that day by the lake. Neither of them ever forgot her valiant, youthful promise, but now—the love destroyed, his beauty mocked by the ugly significance of his uniform, she hoped he was dead.

  CHAPTER 6

  SALLY PUSHED HER chair away from her desk. It was the middle of a dark, muggy summer day and she had been working hard since early that morning writing the Tiechmann report. At last she was finished, and she was sure it was complete and would accomplish its purpose—the conviction of a Waffen-SS officer accused of murdering 189 American prisoners of war. An eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph, a blowup of a snapshot, lay on Sally’s desk, propped against her dictionary. She looked at it for, she hoped, the last time, and put it in the green file that contained her report. She knew her evidence would be instrumental in convicting Klaus Tiechmann, and although she felt strongly that he should be punished, she couldn’t help but feel ambivalent about his possible execution. At any rate, that would not be her decision.

  Tiechmann had been identified by an American serviceman in a POW camp. The enlisted man was the only survivor of the group the major had machine-gunned after they surrendered in the Ardennes Forest. After the armistice, Tiechmann changed his SS uniform for that of a Wehrmacht officer, hoping to pass as regular army. Unfortunately for him, the American survivor, who had pulled guard duty at the POW camp, spotted him one night at chow.

  The SS man was taken from the POW camp and interned at the prison near Munich where he was awaiting trial. He was still denying his SS background, and, because he was one of the few SS men who had not had his blood type tattooed on his upper arms, he was close to being convincing. Except for the American soldier, there was virtually no proof available to the Americans that the man was SS, let alone the commander of the particular unit that had massacred the American prisoners.

  Until a photograph, found in a burned-out tank two years earlier, miraculously made its way onto Sally’s desk. Working with the army photo-lab technicians, Sally had been able to identify the German definitely as the man who the American enlisted man said he was.

  Someone knocked on her door and when she called for him to enter, Sergeant Taveggia shouldered his way into the room. He carried a battered cardboard carton that had once held powdered milk. “A Gift of the United States” was stamped on the side.

  “Where do you want these, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “What is it?” Sally asked, standing and moving the lamp from the corner of her desk. “Put it here.”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Chambers asked me to deliver it to you,” Taveggia said, depositing the box. “She said she found them or something.” He put his fists on his hips, obviously not disposed to leave until he got a look at what was in the box, so Sally took her Swis
s Army knife out of her leather bag and slit open the top. She pulled the flaps apart and looked in.

  “It’s full of photographs,” she said, reaching in and taking out a handful. The pictures were of all sizes, small 2-by-1-inch proofs, snapshots, and portraits; black-and-white, colored, and tinted photos among them. Sally started shuffling through the handful she held, quickly glancing at them. She frowned.

  “What are they?” the sergeant asked, picking up a few pictures and holding them gingerly.

  “I’m not sure. Here, look at these,” she said, handing a few photos across the desk to him. He put the ones he held back in the box and fanned out the batch from Sally in his big hands.

  “They’re all families, aren’t they?” he said.

  “Yeah. Look, someone with her dog.”

  “And here’s a house. With a car in front.” They both held pictures out for each other. “Looks like the one I’ve got of my ’38 Chevy. My wife took it the day I brought the car home. Look, I carry it in my wallet.” And pulling his wallet from his back pocket, he slipped the snapshot out of its slot and held it out. He was right. It was the same kind of picture.

  “These are all like that. Pictures people carry in their wallets, aren’t they?”

  “Yep, looks that way to me, ma’am,” said the sergeant. “Where do you suppose they came from?”

  “I hate to think,” Sally said, reaching for her phone. While she waited for her call to Mavis to go through, Sergeant Taveggia left.

  Mavis came on the line, and when she heard Sally’s voice, asked, “You get my package?”

  “Yes, it’s here on my desk.”

  “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Where are they from, Mavis?” Sally picked up one of the photographs. It was of an older woman and a child, grandmother and grandchild, perhaps. Solemnly, the two stared out at Sally.

  “They’re from a place called Auschwitz. Ever hear of it?”